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Arsenal boss snaps at reporters after disappointing Southampton draw

Arsene Wenger lamented our poor finishing following this Tuesday night’s goalless draw with Southampton, and snapped at reporters who suggested our inactivity in the transfer market was the cause, as reported by Goal.

We created a massive number of chances against the Saints, but their well drilled defence combined with a phenomenal performance from Fraser Forster ensured the game remained goalless.

Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Özil were combining fantastically throughout, and the pair created a huge number of superb chances throughout the game.

Wenger resented suggestion that our failure to score was due to his inactivity in the transfer window, and highlighted that world class strikers were not as easy to come by as many seem to believe.

“If you knew a world class striker who could strengthen our team you should have told me,” Wenger said.

“They don’t walk in the street and say ‘I’m a world class striker please take me’. They are all under contract at big clubs.”

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He’s certainly not wrong, although with the money seemingly available to him you’d think we’d be capable of luring some of these big players away. Almost every club and every player have their price, and Wenger just needs to be willing to find it.

The Frenchman is well aware we didn’t do enough to get the win this past Tuesday night, and rightfully pointed out that with finishing like that you can’t expect to win games. He pin-pointed the performance of of Fraser Forster as a key factor, but suggested that it was largely down to our own wastefulness.

He went on to discuss our title credentials after our last few games without a goal, and was very realistic when discussing how things are going for us at the moment.

“It’s a dream to think you will catch the others if you don’t win your games – and in the last three games we’ve picked up two points,” Wenger added.

“We’ve had a stuttering start in 2016, our January was bad. Where we have a big deficit is the two home games against Chelsea and today. We have to catch that back and we need to respond quickly.

“Forster had a good game, a brilliant game. The quality of the chances we created was high, the quality of the finishing was poor. That explains the result. It’s maximum frustrating.”

This season is arguably our best chance in a long time to lift the Premier League title, and our squad hasn’t looked this strong for a while. We can’t expect to challenge for the title if we aren’t scoring though, and we have to do more in our upcoming games.

Wenger can make all the excuses he wants, but more also needs to be done in the transfer market. The players not being available obviously makes things difficult, but if we can’t bring in top players to compliment the likes of Alexis and Özil then we run the risk of losing them.